They Did It for the Reblogs: Art Poppers MS MR Create Tumblr-Influenced EP

Tumblr came first for the members of indie art-pop duo MS MR, who optimized their debut EP, Candy Bar Creep Show, for the popular microblogging site.

“We had the idea for an EP that we could release through Tumblr before we even knew exactly what this band or project was,” the Lizzy (MS) and Max (MR) said in an e-mail to Wired. “We felt that Tumblr was the perfect platform to present music within a multimedia context, allowing us to show different perspectives of each track.”

Musical acts increasingly use Tumblr to reach listeners, and MS MR’s method made it easy for fans to reblog more than just a single track or image. The New York duo released a series of tracks, remixes, photos and videos exclusively through the microblogging site to build buzz for Candy Bar Creep Show. See the trippy image-collage video for “Ash Tree Lane,” posted Monday, above.

MS MR has been posting something new each week leading up to and following the release of Candy Bar Creep Show, which dropped last Tuesday. When songs from the four-track EP are posted to the MS MR Tumblr they’re posted using a special widget that allows fans to play the track via SoundCloud, watch a video with Vimeo, hear a remix, buy the song, and share the post on Twitter and Facebook. (It can also be reblogged, of course.) MS MR also released audio stems of songs for fans to remix.

“Our goal was to create sort of a media collage, each piece showing a different side of MS MR but none making as much sense individually as part of the whole.”

— MS MR

The widget concept was loosely modeled on a similar Tumblr promotion by R&B maestro Frank Ocean for his album Channel Orange, said Brian Schopfel of Eyes & Ears, who made the widget and whose firm worked on Ocean’s Tumblr release.

All told, the band — which makes the kind of catchy, female-voiced dance rock that would be perfect for the closing credits of an episode of Girls — has garnered more than 9,000 reblogs of their posts. That’s not a huge number, but not bad for an online experiment.

“We had seen what an effective channel Tumblr was for premiering a record,” Schopfel said in an e-mail. “Using various post types, we were able to get featured placement on their Dashboard twice throughout the weekly track release for the EP. This resulted in over 9,000 reblogs, which for a relatively new band was exciting and encouraging.”

Ultimately, the online posts of MS MR’s record become as much a part of the EP as the music itself.

“[It allowed] us to show different perspectives of each track through collaborations with other artists to create photography, videos and remixes,” the band said. “Our goal was to create sort of a media collage, each piece showing a different side of MS MR but none making as much sense individually as part of the whole.”